I have been a scientist in the field of the earth and environmental sciences for 33 years, specializing in geologic disposal of nuclear waste, energy-related research, planetary surface processes, subsurface transport and environmental clean-up of heavy metals. I am a Trustee of the Herbert M. Parker Foundation and consult on strategic planning for the DOE, EPA/State environmental agencies, and industry including companies that own nuclear, hydro, wind farms, large solar arrays, coal and gas plants. I also consult for EPA/State environmental agencies and industry on clean-up of heavy metals from soil and water. For over 20 years I have been a member of Sierra Club, Greenpeace, the NRDC, the Environmental Defense Fund and many others, as well as professional societies including the America Nuclear Society, the American Chemical Society and the American Association of Petroleum Geologists.

The Anthropocene Part 1: Tracking Human-Induced Catastrophe On A Planetary Scale

For almost 30 years, we geologists have been having a debate about what Geologic Epoch we find ourselves in right now. It is presently called the Holocene, but some want to add another epoch and call it the Anthropocene.

Anthropocene combines the Greek words for human and recent time period, to denote the period of time since human activity went global and we became an important geologic process in our own right (In These Times; see also UN video http://vimeo.com/39048998).

In other words, what should we call this period of time when we started trashing the planet? And when did it begin?

You might know some of the big Geologic Ages, Epochs, Periods, Eras and Eons. The dinosaurs died out 66 million years ago in the Maastrichtian Age in the Late Epoch of the Cretaceous Period in the Mesozoic Era of the Phanerozoic Eon.

The sum of Earth’s history, divided up into these different sections, is called the Geologic Time Scale and geologists have been defining and refining it for about 150 years (Geologic Society of America). The latest deliberation concerns the epoch from the present stretching back to about 12,000 years. The term Anthropocene was popularized fourteen years ago by atmospheric scientists Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer, to more decisively focus discussion on human global effects to the whole planet.

The Geologic Time Scale – the sectioning up of 4.6 billion years of Earth’s history into manageable time periods bounded by significant geological events. The present debate is – do we want to call the present epoch we are in the Anthropocene to reflect humanity’s global effect on the planet? Click on the link in the text for the full image. Source: The Geological Society of America

To Judith Wright, a chemostratigrapher, this is not just an academic exercise for the Ivory Tower (Ocean Redox Variations Through Time). There are obvious political and social implications, not the least being the role of human activities in climate change, wholesale extinctions of species unlike anytime in history, and the accelerating environmental destruction on a planetary scale that could spell our own doom.

What we call something matters. It sets the scale of importance and pushes the discussion in the direction that we need these debates to go.

The scientific decision on whether to incorporate the term Anthropocene into the geologic lexicon falls to a carefully deliberative group called the International Commission on Stratigraphy, particularly its Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy which has formed an Anthropocene Working Group. There is a rumor they may arrive at a decision after only several years of debate, making this deliberation downright hasty.

This discussion concerns not just what to name it, but when it started. There is always some defining characteristic to one of these epochs or periods. Often a huge extinction event marks the end of an epoch, like the end of the Triassic Period 200 million years ago when half of all life perished. Or the appearance of something new in evolution, like the beginning of the Cambrian Period when organisms learned how to grow shells, bones, teeth and other hard parts from the increased dissolved minerals in seawater, providing huge survival advantages.

Sometimes there is a chemical marker, or layer, that is unique to that time or process, like the iridium layer that is one of the singular markers of the huge meteorite impact that finally stressed the dinosaurs’ environment to the point of extinction.

But why do stratigraphers get to decide this question? In the geologic sciences, stratigraphy is the study of rock layers on the Earth – how they relate to each other and to relative and absolute time, how they got there, and what they tell us about Earth history. Stratigraphy can be traced to the beginnings of modern geology in the 17th century with Nicholas Steno and his three stratigraphic rules:

- the law of superposition (younger rocks lay on top of older ones)

- the principle of original horizontality (all sedimentary and volcanic layers are originally laid down horizontally, or normal to the Earth’s gravitational field)

- the principle of lateral continuity (sedimentary layers generally continue for a long distance as most were laid down in the ocean, and an abrupt edge indicates that something happened to break it off, like a fault or surface erosion).

These were profound observations and fundamentally changed how we understood time and geologic processes like flooding and earthquakes. In fact, the unique perspective that geology brings to humans is the understanding of time at all levels.

According to Patricia Corcoran and co-workers (GSA), material being laid down across the Earth in our present time is the most bizarre mix of chemicals and materials the Earth has ever seen, some compounds of which have never occurred in nature. Maybe compounds that could not have been produced naturally would make a good marker for the Anthropocene.

But defining a geologic time period requires a sufficiently large, clear and distinctive set of geologic characteristics to be useful as a global geologic boundary and that will also survive throughout geologic time.

We presently find ourselves in the Holocene Epoch of the Quaternary Period in the Cenozoic Era of the Phanerozoic Eon, defined as starting from the end of the last glacial retreat, an obvious event that led to our present global range in climate and other characteristics we define as the Earth today. The problem is, humans have dominated this entire epoch in many ways, from the dawn of agriculture, to smelting of iron and lead, burning of forests and finally the effects of the industrial revolution.

As in all environmental issues, it’s the number of people on Earth that’s the problem. For over 100,000 years, the global human population was steady at about 10 million. Then civilization appeared, fueled by the many significant developments that humans had begun to apply en masse including agriculture, domesticated animals, tools, serious engineering, and various uses of fire, fibers and the wheel.

Our population began to increase about 2000 years ago, at the beginning of the Common Era, rising to 300 million during the Middle Ages and to a billion at the beginning of the Industrial Age. Then 2 billion in 1927, 3 billion in 1960, 4 billion in 1974, 5 billion in 1987, 6 billion in 1999 and 7 billion in 2011. This exponential rise is textbook for a bacterial colony in a petri dish, right before it dies from outpacing its food sources and generating too much waste. It’s also eerily analogous for people on the petri dish of Earth.

Humans now comprise the largest mass of vertebrate matter on land on the entire Earth. The rest is almost all our food and friends, mainly the animals we domesticated over the last 50,000 years, plus a bunch of xenobiotics we’ve transported far from their habitats (Cornell University). Only a small percentage of all vertebrate mass on land is wild or natural (In These Times).

Let that sink in for a minute. Most of what people see in National Geographic or on the Discovery Channel or in movies about animals, IS ALMOST ALL GONE. Humans have dammed a third of the world’s rivers, have covered, destroyed or altered almost half of the world’s land surface. We use up most of the fresh water faster than it can be replenished. And we extinct about 30,000 species every year.

Whether from deforestation, agriculture, urbanization, roads, mining activities, aquatic farming, moving xenobiotic species around the world that destroy native species, dumping huge amounts of waste on land, in the ocean and in the atmosphere, and all other human activities, we have decimated the natural environment without thinking about what effect it has on global ecosystems and what it takes for our own species to survive.

There is a point where humans, our pets, our food animals and our food crops cannot survive without some aspects of a wild nature. Much of our crops need pollinators. The oxygen on this planet comes mainly from organisms in the top 300 feet of the ocean. Biodiversity is not just an environmental catch-phrase, it’s a necessity for survival.

So when did the Anthropocene begin?

Was it when agriculture began, when we started burning forests to clear land? Was it during the Iron Age when we clear-cut the northern forests to smelt iron ore?

Was it the advent of civilization, particularly the rise in agriculture and mining activities around the Mediterranean by the Phoenicians, Greeks and Romans, signified by a rise in environmental Pb levels (Shotyk et al, 1998) that continued until just recently?

Was it the 19th century when our population passed a billion and we began burning fossil fuels that has made carbon itself a global marker? Was it the 20th century when humans passed plate tectonics as the primary mechanism for moving rock and dirt on this planet?

Access to huge amounts of chemical energy trapped in fossil fuels allowed human populations to explode and allowed human effects to really go global. This is why most researchers point to the mid-19th century as the obvious time to start the Anthropocene.

One popular idea for the start of the Anthropocene is the beginning of the atomic age. Above-ground nuclear tests spread unique radionuclides like Pu around the world, elements that have not been seen in our solar nebula for six billion years, but now show up in surface sediments and ice cores, albeit in minute concentrations.

Crutzen recently gave his support for this point in time. However, the atomic age is just another aspect of the modern age of humans not associated with a particular change in a global characteristic. It cannot be seen in the field and marks no special geologic event, and would be more of a political or sociological marker than a geological one.

Perhaps we should wait until the end of this century when the worst effects will be upon us and the world will barely be recognizable to anyone living today. We might be able to just point to the time “when there used to be forests.”

In the end, this debate might be shear hubris since when we are gone, future geologists, of whatever species, will decide for themselves where they want to place the beginning of this particular catastrophe.

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———–” Let that sink in for a minute. Most of what people see in National Geographic or on the Discovery Channel or in movies about animals, IS ALMOST ALL GONE. Humans have dammed a third of the world’s rivers, have covered, destroyed or altered almost half of the world’s land surface. We use up most of the fresh water faster than it can be replenished. And we extinct about 30,000 species every year.”————– ————” Biodiversity is not just an environmental catch-phrase, it’s a necessity for survival.”—————

Thank you James. This is probably the most important article you have ever posted. The problems you present are critical to our survival as a species.

Those who worry about the next hundred years spend a lot of time thinking and talking about an oncoming human-caused apocalypse, but they actually spend very little productive time doing anything truly useful to prevent that apocalyptic scenario from happening.

The only practical means for ending human reliance on fossil fuels over a relatively short period of time, say over the next two to three decades, is for all major energy consuming nations to artificially raise the price of carbon to levels which force a relatively quick transition to alternative energy resources. No pain, no gain, end of story.

In the meantime, I suggest that the period we are now in of thinking and talking, but not doing, be given an intermediate transitional title in the Geologic Time Scale. It shall be called the Cerebrian Age of the Concacene.

Ha! Good one. yes, I agree on the carbon tax. But for all humanity’s problems, unfortunately, I think it will take about two hundred years to get the population back to about a billion, and there may not be lots of the nice things left.

Dr. Conca, you offer the opinion that for the future survivability of mankind on this planet to remain sustainable, the earth’s population should be reduced to about one billion over a time frame lasting about two hundred years.

Twenty years ago, the late Dr. Carl Sagan offered his opinion as to how the growth of the earth’s population could be slowed, stopped, and then eventually reversed.

In his view, the only possible solution was that the entire world must industrialize, thus removing the principle economic incentive for having more children than are needed to replace oneself.

If the entire world must industrialize in order to slow, to stop, and to eventually reverse human population growth, then the process of industrialization will require substantial additional sources of energy, at least at the beginning of the transformation process.

The fastest and most efficient means of industrializing the entire world economy would be through the widespread adoption of the capitalist economic system, operating through free market principles.

However, the capitalist economic system does not directly account for the costs of environmental externalities, and so free market forces will inevitably choose fossil fuels as the principle means of supplying all the additional energy needed to industrialize the entire world and thus bring about an eventual reduction in world population.

Without government intervention in the energy marketplace to artificially raise the price of carbon, the process of industrialization in pursuit of population growth reduction will inevitably cause a short-term to mid-term increase in the consumption of fossil fuels, making all current efforts at reducing the world’s carbon emissions an exercise in futility.

When it comes to controlling world population growth, the point here is this: Be careful what you ask for, you may actually get it.

Yes, the only way to reduce population is to industrialize, another way to say provide energy to all and build a global middle class. That will take about 30 trillion kWhrs/year, double what we produce today, and assumes significant efficiency and conservation. Unfortunately, coal will increase before it decreases. This is why by 2050, China is planning 200 new coal plants, 200 new gas plants, 400 new nuclear plants as well as more renewables than anyone in the world. India is planning 400 new coal plants, 100 new nuclear as well as new hydro and an unknown amount of gas, with not much renewable. It’s important to note that poverty is one of the most environmentally-destructive conditions, and is another reason to industrialize the world. But capitalism will follow energy development, not precede. Economic imperialism was always better than military imperialism.